02-05-2017, 10:46 AM
Environmental microbiology is the scientific study of microorganisms in the environment. This course includes air microbiology, soil microbiology and water microbiology. Microbial ecology (or environmental microbiology) is the ecology of microorganisms: their relationship with each other and with their environment. These are the three main areas of life-Eukaryota, Archaea, and bacteria, as well as viruses.
Microorganisms, by their omnipresence, affect the entire biosphere. Microbial life plays a major role in regulating biogeochemical systems in virtually every environment on our planet, including some of the most extreme, from frozen environments and acidic lacquers, to hydrothermal vents at the bottom of deeper oceans and some Of the more familiar as the human small intestine. As a consequence of the quantitative magnitude of microbial life, microbes, by virtue of their biomass alone, constitute an important carbon sink (Whitman et al., Calculated at 5.0 × 1030 cells, eight orders of magnitude higher than the number of stars in The observable universe). In addition to carbon sequestration, the key collective metabolic processes of microorganisms (including nitrogen fixation, methane metabolism, and sulfur metabolism) control the global biogeochemical cycle. The immensity of the production of microorganisms is such that, even in the absence of total eukaryotic life, these processes are likely to continue unchanged.
While microbes have been studied since the seventeenth century, this research was primarily a physiological rather than an ecological one. For example, Pasteur and his disciples were interested in the problem of microbial distribution both on land and in the ocean. Martinus Beijerinck invented the culture of enrichment, a fundamental method to study the microbes of the environment. He is often wrongly credited with framing the microbial biogeographic idea that "everything is everywhere, but the environment selects it," as Lourens Baas Becking put it. Sergei Winogradsky was one of the first researchers to try to understand microorganisms outside the medical context, making him one of the first students of microbial ecology and environmental microbiology, discovering the chemosynthesis and developing the Winogradsky column in the process.
However, Beijerinck and Windogradsky focused on the physiology of microorganisms, not on the microbial habitat or its ecological interactions. Modern microbial ecology was launched by Robert Hungate and co-workers, who investigated the rumen ecosystem. The rumen study required that Hungate develop techniques for growing anaerobic microbes, and also pioneered a quantitative approach to the study of microbes and their ecological activities that differentiated the relative contributions of species and catabolic pathways.
Microorganisms, by their omnipresence, affect the entire biosphere. Microbial life plays a major role in regulating biogeochemical systems in virtually every environment on our planet, including some of the most extreme, from frozen environments and acidic lacquers, to hydrothermal vents at the bottom of deeper oceans and some Of the more familiar as the human small intestine. As a consequence of the quantitative magnitude of microbial life, microbes, by virtue of their biomass alone, constitute an important carbon sink (Whitman et al., Calculated at 5.0 × 1030 cells, eight orders of magnitude higher than the number of stars in The observable universe). In addition to carbon sequestration, the key collective metabolic processes of microorganisms (including nitrogen fixation, methane metabolism, and sulfur metabolism) control the global biogeochemical cycle. The immensity of the production of microorganisms is such that, even in the absence of total eukaryotic life, these processes are likely to continue unchanged.
While microbes have been studied since the seventeenth century, this research was primarily a physiological rather than an ecological one. For example, Pasteur and his disciples were interested in the problem of microbial distribution both on land and in the ocean. Martinus Beijerinck invented the culture of enrichment, a fundamental method to study the microbes of the environment. He is often wrongly credited with framing the microbial biogeographic idea that "everything is everywhere, but the environment selects it," as Lourens Baas Becking put it. Sergei Winogradsky was one of the first researchers to try to understand microorganisms outside the medical context, making him one of the first students of microbial ecology and environmental microbiology, discovering the chemosynthesis and developing the Winogradsky column in the process.
However, Beijerinck and Windogradsky focused on the physiology of microorganisms, not on the microbial habitat or its ecological interactions. Modern microbial ecology was launched by Robert Hungate and co-workers, who investigated the rumen ecosystem. The rumen study required that Hungate develop techniques for growing anaerobic microbes, and also pioneered a quantitative approach to the study of microbes and their ecological activities that differentiated the relative contributions of species and catabolic pathways.